A Friend in the Ghetto
I was in London, squinting out my kitchen window at a distant helicopter, when a sales rep phoned from some overseas call center. “Mr. Sedriz?” he asked. “Is that who I have the pleasure of addressing?” The man spoke with an accent, and though I couldn’t exactly place it, I knew that he was poor. His voice had snakes in it. And dysentery, and mangoes.
“I am hoping this morning to interest you in a cell phone,” he announced. “But not just any cell phone! This one takes pictures that you can send to your friends.”
“I’m sorry,” I told him. “But I don’t have any friends.”
He chuckled. “No, but seriously, Mr. Sedriz, this new camera phone is far superior to the one you already have.”
When I told him I didn’t already have one, he said, “All the better!”
“No,” I said, “I don’t want one. I don’t need it.”
“How can you not need a cell phone?”
“Because nobody ever calls me?”
“Well, how can they?” he argued.
I told him I was fine with my landline.
“But if you have a cell phone, people will look up to you,” he said. “I know this for a fact. Also it comes with a free trial period, so maybe you should think of it as a temporary gift!”
Hugh would have hung up the moment his name was mispronounced, but I’ve never been able to do that, no matter how frustrated I get. There’s a short circuit between my brain and my tongue, thus “Leave me the f*ck alone” comes out as “Well, maybe. Sure. I guess I can see your point.”
This, though, was out of the question. “Listen,” I finally said. “You trying to give me a camera phone is like me trying to give you…a raccoon.”
There was a pause, and when I realized he didn’t know what a raccoon was, I tried substituting it with a similar-sized animal that lived in a poor country. “Or a mongoose,” I said. “Or a…honey badger.”
“I am going to send you this phone, Mr. Sedriz, and if you’re not happy you can return it with no penalty after three weeks.”
“But that’s just it,” I said. “I won’t be happy. I won’t even take it out of the box, and what’s the point in receiving something I’ll only have to send back?”
The man thought for a moment and sighed. “You, Mr. Sedriz, are down to the earth, and I appreciate that. I can see that you do not want a cell phone, but I did enjoy speaking with you. Do you think I could perhaps call you back one day? We do not have to discuss business but can talk about whatever you like.”
“Well, sure,” I said. “That would be great.”
The following morning my phone rang, and I was genuinely disappointed to find that it wasn’t him. The fact was that I’d enjoyed our conversation. The sales part was a little tiresome, but with that behind us, I hoped we could move on to other things, and that listening to him would be like reading the type of book I most enjoy, one about people whose lives are fundamentally different from my own. By this I mean, different in a bad way. Someone who lives in a mansion spun of golden floss, forget it, but someone who lives in an old refrigerator beside a drainage ditch—by all means, call me! Collect, even.
“You need people like that in your life so you can feel better about yourself,” my mother used to tell me. The first time she said it, I was fourteen and had recently begun the ninth grade. Our school system had just desegregated, and I wanted to invite one of my new classmates to a party at my grandmother’s apartment complex. The girl I had in mind, I’ll call her Delicia, was pretty much my exact opposite—black to my white, fat to my thin—and though my family was just middle-class, I felt certain we were wealthy when compared to hers.
The kids who’d been bused to my school were from the south side. This was a part of town we drove through on our way to the beach, always with the car doors locked and the windows rolled up, no matter how hot it was. I wasn’t sure which of the run-down houses was Delicia’s, but I assumed it was the shackiest. Even dressed up, the girl would have looked like a poor person, not a sassy, defiant one but the kind who had quit struggling and accepted poverty as her lot in life. The clothes she wore seemed secondhand, castoffs suited to a frumpy woman rather than a teenager. Her shoes were crushed down in the back like bedroom slippers, and because of her weight she was frequently out of breath and sweating.
One of the things the north siders learned that year was that black people discriminated against one another just like white people did, and often for the same reasons. Delicia was dark-skinned, and it was that more than her weight that seemed to bring her grief. There was something old-fashioned about her appearance: these full cheeks and round, startled eyes, their whites dazzling in contrast to the rest of her face.
We had two significantly overweight black students at our school that year, and I was always surprised when people confused them for each other. The second girl, Debra, had processed hair, and sticking from it like an ax handle was the grip of an oversize wide-toothed comb. She’d sit at her desk with her book unopened, and when the teacher asked her to turn to page thirty-six, she’d mutter she wasn’t opening nothing to no damn page thirty-six or two hundred neither.
“Did you say something, Debra?”
“No, ma’am,” she’d answer, followed by a closemouthed, almost inaudible, “Hell, yeah, I said something. Take your ugly head outcha ass and maybe you can hear it.”
“I’m sorry, but is there a problem?”
“No.” Then, “Yeah, bitch, you my problem.”
Delicia, by contrast, was timid and sweet, with short Afroed hair and a soft, almost childlike voice. I thought that because she was shy she’d be a good student, but those two things didn’t always go together. She was polite, certainly, and seemed to try as hard as she could. It just wasn’t good enough for the north side. The two of us were in the same English class, and though I told myself that we were friends, her reticence made it hard to hold any kind of real conversation. Like all the new kids, she used the word “stay” in place of “live,” as in “I stay on South Saunders Street,” or “I stay in Chavis Heights.” Delicia stayed with her aunt, which she pronounced to rhyme with “taunt.”
That was all I knew about her personal life. Everything else was my own invention. I decided for a start that she was virtuous and eager to change, that our association was, in some substantial way, improving her. It’s not how a person would think of an actual friend, much less a potential girlfriend. This was the status I upgraded her to a few weeks into the school year. At fourteen, I figured it was about time I took the plunge. Everyone kept asking if I was going steady, or at least everyone creepy kept asking, particularly the men from the Greek Orthodox church, who’d refer even to newborn babies as “lady-killers” and wonder how many hearts they had broken. Like it wasn’t enough to be dating at the age of three weeks, you also had to be two-timing someone.
To the other boys in my Sunday school class, it was “Who’s the lucky lady?” To me it was just “Find anyone yet?” And though at that age I never could have admitted it, I was as physically attracted to Delicia as I’d have been to any female. Her body was no less appealing to me than that of our head cheerleader, so why not have the two-hundred-fifty-pound girlfriend from the wrong side of town?
The idea coincided with my Greek grandmother’s moving from our house into a new senior citizens’ apartment complex called Capital Towers. She was cruelly out of place there, the only resident who wasn’t born in the United States and who didn’t try, in that resolutely American way, to be gay and youthful. Where Yiayiá was from, old age was not something to be disguised or outrun. Rather, you embraced it, and gratefully, for decrepitude, in Greece, was not without its benefits. There, you lived in a compound with your extended family, and everyone younger than you became your pawn. In America, being old got you nothing but a spare bedroom that was painted purple and had bumper stickers on the door. Then one day your daughter-in-law decides she’s had enough, and out you go, not just to an apartment but to a studio apartment, which basically means a bedroom with a kitchen in it.
Capital Towers was trying to get an activities program going. A social was to be held on a Sunday afternoon in early October, and that, I decided, was just the place to take Delicia on our first date.
“You’ve got to be kidding me,” my mother said.
“No,” I told her. “I think it would be interesting for her to meet Yiayiá.”
“Interesting?” My mother allowed her tone of voice to do the heavy lifting, as unless you were making a documentary about gloom, there was nothing interesting about my grandmother. Or at least not to us at the time. If I could go back to 1972, and if I were able to understand Greek, she might have told me all sorts of fascinating things: what it was like to endure a loveless arranged marriage, to be traded away by your family and forced to sail to another country. From Ellis Island, she went to Cortland, New York, a little town in the western part of the state. There, she and her pitiless husband opened a newsstand not much larger than their cash box. What was it like to forfeit your youth? To be illiterate in two languages? To lose every tooth in your head by the age of forty? All I really knew was that Yiayiá loved us. Not in a specific way—she could no sooner name our good qualities than the cat could—yet still we could feel it. I’d occasionally allow her to stroke my hand. All us kids would from time to time, and all of us thought of it as work. Oh, how exhausting it was to let someone adore you.
My Yiayiá was exactly the sort of friend I’d have liked as an adult, someone with an endless supply of hard-luck stories and no desire to ever write a book. At the time, though, she was just an obligation. If I had to go to the social, I figured I might as well get something out of it—hence bringing Delicia. All we’d have to do was walk in holding hands, and the old people would freak out, no one more so than my grandmother. “Who the blackie?” she’d likely ask, for that was the word she continued to use, no matter how often we shouted “Negro” at her.
“I’m not having any part of it,” my mother said.
“So you won’t even give us a ride?”
When she told me no, I accused her of being prejudiced. “You just don’t want your son dating a girl who’s not white.”
She said she didn’t care who I dated but that I was not going to bring this Delicia person to Capital Towers.
“Fine, then, I’ll bring her to church.”
“You’re not bringing her there either,” my mother told me. “It’s not fair to her.”
“You object to anyone who’s not like you!” I yelled. “You’re just afraid your grandchildren will be half black.”
How I’d jumped from dragging some poor girl to a senior citizens’ apartment complex to dating her and then to fathering her children is beyond me now, but my mother, who by then had three teenagers and three more coming right behind them, took it in stride.
“That’s right,” she said. “I want you to marry someone exactly like me, with a big beige purse and lots of veins in her legs. In fact, why don’t I just divorce your father so the two of us can run off together?”
“You’re disgusting,” I told her. “I’ll never marry you. Never!” I left the room in a great, dramatic huff, thinking, Did I just refuse to marry my mother? and then, secretly, I’m free! The part of my plan that made old people uncomfortable, that exposed them for the bigots they were—and on a Sunday!—still appealed to me. But the mechanics of it would have been a pain. Buses wouldn’t be running, so someone would have to drive to the south side, pick up Delicia, and then come back across town. After I’d finished shocking everyone, I’d have to somehow get her home. I didn’t imagine her aunt had a car. My mother wasn’t going to drive us, so that just left my dad, who would certainly be watching football and wouldn’t leave his spot in front of the TV even if my date was white and offered to chip in for the gas. Surely something could be arranged, but it seemed easier to take the out that had just been handed to me and to say that our date was forbidden.
Love seemed all the sweeter when it was misunderstood, condemned by the outside world. The thing about Delicia was that we barely knew each other. Her interest in me was pure conjecture, based not on anything she’d said or done but on my cruel assumption that no one else would be interested in her. Our most intimate conversation took place when I unbuttoned my shirt one afternoon and showed her what I was hiding beneath it: a T-shirt that pictured a male goose mounted, midair, on a female, his tongue drooping from his bill in an expression of satisfied exhaustion. “See”—and I pointed to the words written across my chest—“it says ‘Fly United.’”
Delicia blinked.
“That’s an airline,” I told her.
“You crazy,” she said.
“Yes, well, that’s me!”
On the Monday after the social, I broke it to Delicia that I’d wanted to take her somewhere special but that my parents hadn’t allowed it. “I hate them,” I told her. “They’re so prejudiced you wouldn’t believe it.”
I don’t know what response I expected, but a show of disappointment would have been a good start. If this relationship was going to take off, we needed a common cause, but that, it seemed, was not going to happen. All she said was “That’s okay.”
“Well, no, actually, it’s not okay,” I told her. “Actually it stinks.” I laid my hand over hers on the desktop and then looked down at it, thinking what a great poster this would make. “Togetherness,” it might read. I’d expected electricity to pass mutually between us, but all I really felt was self-conscious, and disappointed that more people weren’t looking on.
As for Delicia, what goes through a person’s mind the first time they’re patronized? Was she embarrassed? Enraged? Or perhaps this wasn’t her first time. Maybe it happened so often she’d simply resigned herself to it.
It’s a start, I thought as I lifted my hand off hers and turned around in my seat. I figured we had our entire lives ahead of us, but by Thanksgiving I’d been accepted into a crowd of midlevel outcasts and had pretty much forgotten about her. We still said hello to each other, but we never ate lunch together or talked on the phone or did any of the things that real friends did. I don’t recall seeing her in the later grades and am not sure if she attended my high school or if she stayed on her side of town and went to Enloe. It must have been a good seven years before I saw her again. I had dropped out of my second college and was working as a furniture refinisher not far from downtown Raleigh. There was a dime store I’d pass on my bike ride home each day, and I looked up one afternoon to see Delicia walking out the front door. She had a name tag on and a smock, and when I stopped to say hello she seemed to genuinely remember me.
“So, are you the manager of this place?” I asked.
And she said, “You crazy.”
I’d like to think that Delicia managing a dime store was not on the same level as a T-shirt reading “Fly United,” so her response saddened me. My invented version of her was pragmatic and responsible, but all I really knew was that she was nice and shy, and apparently still poor. By this time we were in our twenties, and I understood that friendship could not be manufactured. You didn’t look through your address book thinking, Where are the Koreans? or I need to meet more paralyzed people. Not that it’s outlandish to have such friends, but they have to be made organically.
The people I hung out with in my early twenties were middle-class and, at least to our minds, artistic. We’d all turned our backs on privilege, but comfortably, the way you can when you still have access to it. No one wanted to call home asking for money, but we all knew that in a pinch our parents would come through for us. It was this, more than race, that set me apart from Delicia, for how could someone on the bottom rung of the ladder not be outraged by the unfairness of it all?
Passing the dime store on subsequent afternoons, I’d think of my family’s former maid, Lena, who started working for us when my brother was born and stayed until my grandmother moved out. She and my mom spent a lot of time talking, and though my mother, like all the mothers on our street, thought of her housekeeper as a friend, I knew that what she really meant was “a person I pay and am on good terms with.” For how many mothers hung out with other people’s maids? What would the O’Connors have thought if my mom showed up at their door with a canteen around her neck? “Is Marthandra off work yet? I thought the two of us might try camping this weekend.”
Maybe in a tent, away from the cars and color TVs and air-conditioning, a friendship could have taken root. As it was, there was just too much inequality to overcome. If you want a friend whose life is the economic opposite of your own, it seems your best bet is to find a pen pal, the type you normally get in grade school. This is someone who writes from afar to tell you that his dromedary escaped. You respond that your bike has a flat tire, and he answers that in his country August is a time for feasting. It’s all done through the mail, so he never sees your new suburban house, and you never see the hubcap his family uses to boil water in. Plus, you’re a kid, so your first thought isn’t Yuck, a dromedary, but Wow, a dromedary! Or a raccoon, or a mongoose, or a honey badger.
As weeks passed and the cell phone salesman didn’t call back, I started worrying that he’d lost his job. Maybe, though, that’s just me being a cultural elitist, assuming that his life must go from bad to worse. Isn’t it just as likely that he got promoted or, better still, that he left the call center for greener pastures? That’s it, I tell myself. Once he settles into the new job and moves into that house he’s been eyeing, after his maid has left for the day and he’s figured out which remote works the television and which one is for the DVD player, he’s going to need someone to relate to. Then he’ll dig up my number, reach for his cell phone, and, by God, call me.